Exposing pro-Israel bias, propaganda, disinformation and spin in Australia's mainstream media. Monitoring pro-Israel influence in Australia's public and political arena.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Behind the ASIO Assessment

An example of the obscenity which is Australia's treatment of asylum seekers:

"Sumathi Rahavan never predicted the Kafkaesque situation that awaited her young family when she boarded the Australian Customs boat, Oceanic Viking, last year. The [Tamil] Sri Lankan has given birth as an immigration detainee, been branded a national security risk by [the] Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and now faces 24-hour surveillance with 3 guards watching over her family, which is being held in detention indefinitely. Her husband, Yogachandran Rahavan, [is] also declared a national security threat by the spy agency... The saga began when Mrs Rahavan decided to join her husband in Australia, bundling their daughter Atputha, 6, and son Abinayan, 3, on to what was to become the most politically charged boatload of asylum seekers under the Rudd government. In its haste to end a diplomatic stand-off with Indonesia, the Australian government offered all refugees on Oceanic Viking a special resettlement deal. As refugees, the government cannot return the Rahavans to possible danger in Sri Lanka. But because ASIO assesses them a security risk, the family cannot be settled in Australia... The reasons ASIO has for its suspicions may never be revealed. The agency's decisions in immigration matters are not reviewable. Mr Rahavan adamantly denied he was involved with the Tamil Tigers separatist group and said he did not know why he could be considered a risk... At Villawood [Detention Centre], the Rahavans are watched 24 hours a day. Emails are blocked and phone calls must go through immigration staff who type in 'approved' numbers and confirm who is on the line before passing the phone over. 'There's all the time - 24/7 - two officers inside the house', Mr Rahavan said. 'There is a Serco vehicle and officer, who watches us 24/7 through the window'. Some family members are authorised to visit and others not." (ASIO ruling puts asylum seekers in no man's land, Yuko Narushima, Sydney Morning Herald, 22/11/10)

"The Terrorist Experts (TE) project the violence of the rulers, their conquistadorial ambitions, their greed to seize land and resources, and their savage destructive impulses onto their victims while the responses of the victims, the survivors, are clothed in the rhetoric of pathological behaviour. The really clinical pathologies are to be found, however, in the minds of the verbal assassins - who cannot decipher the causal relation between the repeated rapes and tortures committed by their patron-states and the desperate cries and attempts at self-defence of the excluded, displaced, and exploited, or arrive at any appropriate moral conclusion. Almost all the terror experts have a chronic psychological blindness to the systematic and comprehensive violence inflicted by the West and Israel on particular groups. Today it is the 'Arabs'; at other times it is all insurgents who respond to imperial violence with violence." (The Power of Israel in the United States, 2006, pp 148-149)

"The TE simply pronounce their diagnosis of the armed resistance fighters: incurable psychopaths, extremely dangerous when at large. The politicians dictate the commands: capture, confine, torture, or kill. The Special Forces break through doors in the middle of the night, cut throats, or take prisoners. The prison commandants establish the rules of 'interrogation'. The guards torture. This is a very coherent international division of labor, in which the TE play an important part in elaborating the rationale. They ply a mortally and scientifically justified war-unto-death of the 'untermensch', the 'inferior' peoples, the 'fundamentalist Arab Muslims', the 'suicide bombers', the 'Terrorists'. A common language is spoken between the TE and their state patrons, and then promoted in and by the mass media." (ibid p 152)